Yeah it's blog time!! It's been a fair while since we posted an entry and forever since I (Ben) have contributed, so I thought I had better make the effort to keep all of our faithful followers informed, entertained and feeling loved. Haha! Now all I have to do is come up with something interesting to say. Come on Ben you can do this!!
What I love about life and especially the Christian faith is the amount of diversity we all carry. How we see things differently and still manage to love each other, because He has first loved us. I know that there will be people that read this blog who absolutely love us, but wouldn't necessarily express their walk with Christ in the same way we do. I also know there are many that would align themselves with how we express Christ's love on the earth. So I want to be able to be honest with all of you and tell you all of the things that are taking place in my experience over here, as I know a lot of you are interested in finding out more about what I am up to in my studies. But at the same time I don't want you to think that I am just trying to espouse my own personal view on you, or that in any way that I am trying to be controversial with how I express what is now for me "The normal Christian life."
All of that as way of an introduction to some of the incredible things that I have been seeing God do over the last few weeks.
As part of my schooling I applied and was accepted to be a part of the Bethel Healing rooms ministry, for the activation part of my course. Which is an amazing honour, as this ministry is world renowned and people fly from all parts of the globe to be in a place where people will join them in contending for their breakthrough in healing. It really has been a growing and stretching experience. There was a lot of training, and teaching to go through before I was allowed to be a prayer servant. For a few weeks I was on a prayer team but only as an observer to see and learn to honour the vision that Bethel has, for how to pray for, and honour every person that walks in asking for prayer.
It really has blown my mind the amount of healings that I have been seeing through Jesus working through my own hands, and just the amount of testimonies that come in every week is simply amazing. I posted a video earlier in the year of God growing out a significantly shorter leg to perfectly match the length of the normal leg which demonstrates miracles aren't limited to just the healing rooms in this culture, it's in Church, it's in the carpark, it's down at the local shopping mall with unbelievers, it's become so normal that it has forced me to address what my new normal now looks like!!!
A big part of it for me, is being willing to step over the chicken line. To step into territory where I was afraid, where I needed to take a risk and to be willing to see nothing obvious happen to give opportunity to see their life forever transformed in a moment of time. It's the same as when we are evangelizing, in that again we need to be willing to be completely rejected and humiliated to give them the opportunity to receive the greatest miracle available, being born again.
So as I have started to overcome a lot of fear and I have started to see a lot of breakthrough in healing. And lately I have been going after growing in the Spiritual gift of the word of knowledge which I have found to be an incredible help in seeing God move more often in healing power. A word of knowledge as it pertains to healing is God revealing to you prophetically a part of a person's body that you feel God wants to heal. Something that you could never have known without the Holy Spirit revealing it to you. The faith that comes into the situation with both the person being prayed for and the one doing the praying is significant once we see what God desires to do rather than what we had planned to do. Again I have to give a lot of this background and basic rundown just to give a frame work for the experiences that I am about to tell you. This is the longest introduction ever. So let's get on with it.
So the healing rooms are on every Saturday morning from about 9am-12pm, and last Saturday morning was the most amazing morning I have had.
A good friend and I were invited by the leaders to go around in the Encounter Room and give words of knowledge and pray for people before they got into the formal prayer room. Within the Encounter Room, there is live worship music playing, there are dancers dancing around, there are artists painting in the centre of the room, and there is just such an atmosphere of the tangible presence of God. It is a room where people go and wait for their turn to actually fit in to the prayer room for prayer as the numbers are often quite overwhelming. Essentially, it's like a time of preparation and soaking where God often heals people without anyone actually praying for them.
Anyway, my friend and I were just waiting on the Holy Spirit and going up to people we felt God was highlighting and then sometimes they would tell us what they wanted prayer for, but often times we would just get a word of knowledge regarding what God wanted to heal without them telling us. We weren't getting it 100% right but it was amazing how many times it was right, and how many times God healed after a word of knowledge was given.
We had one guy come in who we didn't realize until later was an unbeliever and had only come into support his wife, who was a believer and was in the midst of fighting cancer. My friend got a word of knowledge about this man's shoulder, so we asked him if it was correct and after confirming that the word was accurate, prayed for his shoulder to be healed. The look on his face was priceless, he couldn't believe it, but he had to acknowledge that his shoulder was significantly better than before we had prayed for him. We continued to pray for him, and then his auntie who was also part of the family entourage came up and joined us. I got a word of knowledge about her back, and her abdomen. She then told us that she has cancer in her abdomen and that her back had given her problems for 20 years, needless to say I was encouraged as taking this big of a risk in hearing from God is new to me. My friend's accuracy and boldness with the words God was giving him was also so encouraging to me. He then got a word about this guys back, and he had similar problems to his auntie. They both had pain in the lower back off to one side. So we got them to sit down in a chair and test the length of their legs and sure enough both of them had one leg significantly shorter than the other. We first prayed for the man and the aunty watched his leg grow out instantly, and then we got the man to come down close and watch God grow out his aunties leg which God did right before his nose and he was obviously amazed and perplexed, haha! We were able to minister and pray for the man, he wasn't completely ready to become a believer but God has obviously completely opened him up to the reality of the gospel!!!
We then approached a man and his son, who was about 10yrs old. The Dad was having roughly the same kind of back pain as the last two people who's legs grew out. So we got him to sit down and measure his leg lengths and again one leg was significantly shorther than the other. We got excited and told the son to come down near his Dad's feet. We then got the son to lay his hands on his Dad's leg and told him to command the leg to grow out in Jesus' Name, and sure enough, out grew the leg in front of his eyes. And the excitement and look on his face was so good. Just to know that here is a kid that won't grow up with all the doubts and fears about God and His nature that so many of us did. That he has not only a belief for healing but now has an experience to back it up stands him in great sted to see God move mightily in his life without having to push through so many barriers of unbelief, that many of us have had too.
I know this is long but the next story is incredible. We then asked another lady to join us and pray as we felt led to pray for a certain lady and weren't allowed to pray for her without a female on our team. She had massive scars on her neck, both on the front and back. She had undergone numerous surgeries, the final one being to insert a titanium rod into her neck, to keep all of the neck straight and stable from a serious accident she had been involved in years earlier. We asked her what her pain level was out of 5, and it was a 5/5. And how much she could move her neck, which really wasn't much at all. We then prayed and she started to get really hot, and was obviously under the power of God with quite a bit of shaking, and we again asked her what her pain level was. She was now at a 4/5, so we all thanked and praised God for what He was doing. We have learned to always be thankful to God for whatever He is doing. We chose to focus on the miracle of it having improved from a 5 to a 4, instead of looking at the fact that her pain level was still at a 4/5. We prayed again and again, and we saw the pain go from a 5, to a 4, to a 2, to uncomfortable, to 0. We then saw her roll her neck to almost complete levels of freedom. Which is an absolute impossibility with a the rod in her neck. Her family were in shock, she was in shock, we were in shock it was an incredible miracle. Thankyou God!
There are so many more stories from that Saturday morning but I know this is getting very lengthy so I'll leave it at that. I just felt it was important to give you guys an insight to what God is doing and what I am seeing and experiencing over here.
I am learning and growing so much in so many ways. Being stretched beyond what I thought I could do, and seeing God do far more than I had seen before coming here. It really is an amazing place and am so thankful to you all and to God for making it possible to be here. But God doesn't just want miracles and healings to be limited to inside a Church building or a healing service. He is looking for us to imitate Christ and the way He ministered with teaching and preaching in both the synagogue and the marketplace. To partner preaching and teaching with a demonstration of the reality of what He was telling them was true. Both inside and especially outside of the Church. Through the trained and the untrained. He wants His good news demonstrated with signs following (Mark 16)
Thanks for reading this far, and hopefully I will write another post in the next day or so telling you about my upcoming missions trip!!
Love it brother!!
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